


Bestial or Otherwise

by threesmallcrows



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, Healing, Nightmares, Past Torture, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2016-01-03
Packaged: 2018-05-10 09:03:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5579509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threesmallcrows/pseuds/threesmallcrows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>According to Maslow, there are five basic needs: physiological, safety, love, esteem, and actualization.</p><p>The Dark takes them from Kylo, one-by-one.</p><p>The Light tries to give them back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Physiological

To strip someone of their humanity, the boy discovers, is a fairly simple thing.

 

Deprive the flesh of food, of water, of shelter, of _air._ Rinse. Repeat.

 

These are animal needs. Once upon a time he never thought of them. They are far from below him, now. They are everything.

 

He is an animal. He cannot think to remember who it was that made him so.

 

Darkness. They blind him. He discovers the sensory deprivation cell, learns it, intimately. A wonder that his own body’s senses could be made to turn against him like that. When they lock him in he loses all time. When they take him out he burns for eternities. His own screams pain him more. The way he scratches at himself, raking lines of fire down his arms. The once-gentle floor presses like a pummeling against his skin. When he comes back to himself he is ten centuries older. He lies on the ground, naked, wet, trembling all over like a newborn, and like a newborn not a single vestige of thought lives in his ashen, burnt-out mind.

 

If he could think, he could almost admire its sheer, toothed, ruthless effectiveness.

 

He cannot think.

 

Darkness. They choke him. There is no time slower than that that stretches between the closing of an invisible fist around his throat and brownout, a long noose swaying in the air. Slower still between that and blackout. So far he has never failed to awaken. This does not mean that, each time, he does not believe he is dying.

 

Because he cannot think. When the fist is around his throat he cannot possibly anticipate a future, any future, in which he lives. So he stares, fading, at his own death. He turns into a creature that lives in the spaces between seconds, crouched and always, always afraid.

 

Darkness. The human body can last a long, long time without food. Less long without water, but that, too, they push to the limits. That, too, they exploit.

 

Open the cage with your force, they tell him. The water is just on the other side.

 

He scrapes a tongue like stone around the cave of his mouth. He cannot remember the words for _cannot_ , for _please_. He is an animal swaying on all fours. Soon he will not even be that. Soon he will be a powdery skull on the ground.

 

The water speaks to him. It says: open it. Everything, _everything_ is within your power. Didn’t you know?

 

Brownout to blackout.

 

Rinse and repeat.

 

()

 

“It’s not poisoned.”

 

Their prisoner looks at her like he’s believed nothing less in his entire life.

 

Rey leans over, watching the cuffs that limit his Force carefully, swipes a finger through the stew, and licks it off.

 

“Hm. Not exactly yum, but still not poisoned.”

 

He spits at her, and she leaves. There’s only so much babysitting she can stand in a day.

 

“Had more spine than I’d given him credit for,” she says, much later. She stands over Kylo’s prone form. He’s starved himself to the point of blackout. They put him on a drip. Rey has a hunch that this is what Kylo wants. This way, he can tell himself that they are forcing him. That they are keeping him prisoner.

 

So she waits at his side with a steaming bowl of stew, and the second his eyes flicker open she takes a spoonful and ladles it straight between his full lips. He is very weak and has been awake less than a few seconds; his guard is down, and he does not manage to conceal the flash of pleasure that dances across his eyes.

 

“The drip’ll keep you alive,” she says, “but only real food’ll make you smile.”

 

He scowls at her. It is an impressive impersonation of someone who’s never once smiled since they were born, and it doesn’t fool Rey for a second.

 

“Finn or somebody will be along with more later. Maybe. If no one’s too busy. Think on it.”

 

She leaves him. She thinks he probably licks his lips, once he’s alone.


	2. Safety

They come for him in the middle of the night. He is taken by surprise. Ten years from now no Stormtrooper will dare step uninvited over the threshold of his room. Right now he is still a relative nobody, his Force weak and flickering from the stress and the injuries and prone to sputtering out altogether. He is not, in other words, a threat. They beat him, thoroughly but not viciously. They are under orders.

 

For lack of a better weapon he puts a knife under his pillow. He rolls too close to it in his nightmares and nearly puts his own eye out. He learns to sleep very still and very shallow. Passage through a rough system or the slight leap of the ship’s hyperdrive propelling them into light speed becomes enough to wake him.

 

He’s getting stronger, he decides. That’s what the insomnia, the jumpiness, the way his hands shake after too few hours of rest mean. They must, because otherwise what would the point be?

 

()

 

They have Kylo on constant surveillance. Of course, neither the General nor Han are the happiest about it, but they more than anyone recognize the necessity. Kylo attempts to escape, more than once, usually just wounding himself more in the process. But the cameras are helpful for other things, as well.

 

“Rey. Rey—wake up.”

 

She scowls awake.

 

“What the devil, Finn?”

 

“He’s screaming his head off again.”

 

“And, so?”

 

“So help me!”

 

“Just ignore it,” she mutters.

 

“I can’t. Rey, don’t go back to—switch watch with me, then. I can take your day shift ‘cause he’ll just be scowling, then, and that I can handle. But I can’t deal with this—noise. _Rey._ ”

 

He’s pulled at her hair. This is unforgiveable. She opens her eyes to look at him. His broad forehead is damp with sweat.

 

“Please?” he says.

 

When they get to the monitor bay Kylo is no longer screaming. He is also no longer sleeping. He sits on the bed like some kind of mournful vulture, slouched, hair wild. One of the cameras has a good view of his face; his stare is thousand-light-year distant and unfocused and his eyes look bruised-dark.

 

Rey reaches for the communicator before Finn can stop her.

 

“Kylo Ren,” she says.

 

He does not respond, so she says nothing more. Just reaches out with her newborn Force and touches the edge of his mind.

 

“Rey,” says Finn, nervously, watching Kylo yell and buck, curses and spittle flying. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

 

“Why ask when you’d not like the answer?”

 

She has only looked into him, before. Never tried to inflict. _First time for everything, I guess_. She tries for soothing memories; hers are of the endless curves of the sand, the sun balanced like a white egg in the sky, the dusty echoing confines of a ship downed a century ago and the light that fell in like braids of hair. The edges of his terror lash her like a whip and she turns away and presses the desert horizon into him like a heavy blanket on a dog, settling him by force.

 

“Get out.”

 

His voice is very hoarse and lower than ever.

 

“Calm yourself, and I will.”

 

“ _Out_.”

 

He pushes back, and she lets go. After a moment he moans and presses the backs of his wrists into his eyes.

 

“Enough, I think.”

 

“Jakku?” asks Finn. She hadn’t know he’d gotten the backlash.

 

She kisses the side of his cheek, quick.

 

“Go. I’ll stay the shift. Take mine in the day.”

 

“You’ll be alright?”

 

“I can handle him.”

 

In the cell, Kylo eventually manages a cat nap of thirty minutes or so before jolting back into consciousness, panting and clawing at nothing, ghosts in his eyes. Rey watches him, lets him be. Let him reach for the desert himself, next time. He must learn.

 


	3. Love

Snoke sends assassin after assassin to him, like little surprise gifts. A dagger in his ribs mid-conversation. A poisoned meal. What a loving father. Raising a strong son.

 

Once—it pains him to even admit it, now—there was a girl. A strong, smart, deadly, beautiful girl. She who looked straight past the plate of his helmet and into his eyes like there was no black glass between their gazes. She understood his anger and his hate. She was burning, too. And he had wanted to tell her, _I burn a little less around you_. It was not what she wanted. She wanted them to be fuel on one another’s fires, pyres leaping higher and higher until they became star killers themselves, exploding across the universe to wreak vengeance on civilizations like age-old brimstone.

                                                                                                                                             

No matter. On the anniversary of their meeting she touched his unmasked face and tried to take his head and he swept his lightsaber twice through her body, two beautiful strokes like the bars of a ship’s wheel. He left her remains smoking and quartered on the floor. He forbade himself to weep. Snoke praised him, afterwards. That was all that mattered.

 

 

()

 

“I will never call you father.”

 

“Yeah, well, I ain’t exactly ready to call you son, either.”

 

Besides Rey, Chewbacca rolls his eyes and makes a cutting motion across his neck. Even BB-8 produces a disappointed whine.

 

On Rey’s other side, the General sighs loudly. Rey follows her out and runs nearly face-first into Han as he comes stomping around the corner.

 

“That ungrateful bastard—”

 

“Ben, you mean?”

 

“He’s not Ben.” His glance crosses Rey’s, and he turns away, recollecting himself, arms crossed tight over his chest. “Not yet, anyway. In there, that’s all Kylo.”

 

“They’re not two different people, Han.”

 

“You talk to him, then.”

 

“I’m going to, thank you.”

 

“Probably be better if she handles it,” adds Rey. The look Han gives her is pure fury and reminds her of Kylo’s in the interrogation chamber. She shrugs, as she did back then.

 

When Han has removed himself from the situation, Leia gives her half a smile.

 

“What are you going to say to him?” asks Rey.

 

“I don’t plan to say anything. I’d like to listen, if he’ll talk.”

 

“He’ll talk, all right. He’ll yell.”

 

“I’m his mother.”

 

“That’ll make it worse, not better.”

 

“I don’t see it as worse. It’s like lancing a boil, Rey. A little sting helps things along in the long run.”

 

“What is that? The long run?”

 

The General snorts. “Who knows? I don’t have a plan, and I doubt the boy’s father does either. But, right now, I am going to go in there and show him that somebody can still love him.”

 

“You’ll frighten him. He’s scared of everything—he’s like an animal.”

 

Leia gives Rey a look she cannot read, and she falters. She wonders if she’s said the wrong thing.

 

“Indeed,” says the General. “But it’s a start.”


	4. Esteem

He can admit, now, that the Dark and the Light tear at him. It is impersonal; they merely play the same cosmic war they always have, and he is just a link unfortunate enough to be caught in the pulling-chain between them.

 

Neither side cares if he tears in half with their ministrations. Simply, if he does not become stronger, he will die from it.

 

Sometimes it angers Kylo when the troopers who used to beat him now flinch back in fear. They think that beneath the helmet lies somebody worthy.

 

_How could anyone think you’re worthy?_

_I am worthy._

_You’re not. The Light is in you like a poison, and you don’t have the strength to rid yourself of it._

_I do, and I will. I just need more time._

_Vader didn’t need more time. Vader wouldn’t have flinched from Snoke’s punishments the way you did. Snivelling, so afraid. That trooper would have laughed and spit in your face had he seen the way you looked._

_That was then. I’m beyond that, now._

Laughter. Always, the laughter, and the mockery in a whisper: _Prove it._

When he (slowly, so slowly) sticks his own fingers into his wounds and spreads them, disturbs the healing, he hears like a murmur beneath the pain, _Disgusting, to have to resort to these measures to draw the Dark closer_.

 

When he takes a blaster into one of the training bays and spends three days firing shots at himself off the bay’s reflective walls, he hears, _Weak, still so weak despite the Supreme Leader’s endless patience and tutelage—you crawl for the Force where Vader ran with it. Snoke has not tired yet, but he will, and you will be discarded as you deserve._

He grits his teeth as another bolt hums by too close and hot leather, melting, sticks to flesh. He ignores the voice. He has no other choice. To give in would be a defeat he cannot recover from.

When Snoke finally orders Hux to give him the lightsaber, Kylo realizes what he’s been missing like a phantom limb itch for years and years now. The way the red explodes from his touch makes even the steely general flinch back, if only by a quarter of an inch.

 

He raises the saber to his face. The twin peaks of the crossguards waver and shiver, dancing and lethal; the plasma distorts the light around it until the room itself seem to leap and twist to wrap around the blade.

 

_What a beautiful weapon._

Kylo licks his lips. Unbidden, ripples from the Dark rise in his head: choking smoke from a village on fire, beaded sweat crawling on a prisoner’s naked body before interrogation, the way a planet implodes, screaming on the surface but silent viewed from space.

 

_You’re still afraid._

_Only that I will not have enough years to know all of the Dark._ Preemptively, he adds, _I deserve this. The Supreme Leader knows so and Hux knows so. And the saber recognizes me as its owner. It sings in my grasp. I will accomplish great things with it, and all of the First Order and the Resistance shall know me alike. And then I will send you into oblivion. Your days are numbered. Count on them while you can._

_We’ll see,_ it says, after a long while. _Once you do battle._

And the voice—his own voice, but slightly filtered, the voice others hear when he puts on the helmet—goes silent. It is, Kylo realizes, a triumph. Perhaps his first.

 

Hux is still looking at him, at the smile pinned like a butterfly on his lips. Sardonically, he asks him if he’s happy.

 

Kylo thinks he’s a fool.

 

()

 

“Would it not be better…”

 

In the dark, Rey groans. He must be able to feel her, even with his damaged, impeded Force. He always waits for her to get there before spouting off.

 

She contemplates telling him to keep a diary. Or, better yet, dropping one into his cell through the tube his food arrives in, the better to avoid giving him an opening into a conversation. Could he somehow manage to kill somebody with a diary? Privately, she doubts he has the will left in him.

 

“Go to sleep,” she says into the communicator. Sometimes a direct acknowledgement makes him lose his nerve and go back mute.

 

On screen, she watches him falter. Silence. _Hooray._

A few minutes later, he says, “You’d be better off rid of me.”

 

“If only.”

 

She can tell she’s stunned him, if only momentarily. Rey laughs. “Lost your tongue? Was that too harsh for you? You thought I’d beg you to stay? You’re not that precious. Not to me. Not to many of us.”

 

“Correct,” he says. “I’m not— _precious_ to anybody.”

 

“Wrong again,” she answers tartly. “Thank your ma and pa—or aren’t you speaking with them yet?”

 

“I have nothing to say to them.”

 

The temptation to tell him to grow up is very strong. She’d try it, but she’s fairly sure she’s told him already.

 

The temptation to tell him to go to hell is equally so. She bites her lower lip. She has gotten to known the smuggler and the General better as they share pieces of Kylo’s confinement between them. But one doesn’t have to know them well to see the love they hold for their son, a love like a guiding star in the vast darkness of the galaxy, to bring the two together no matter how far they wandered.

 

To run away from such love is to Rey an incomprehensibility verging on sin. To betray such trust is an act that twists her more than she thinks it probably should. She is but a third party, but she hurts for Leia and Han.

 

What she wouldn’t give to have what Kylo haves.

 

She, who waited for so long on Jakku that she had begun to forget who she was waiting for.

 

Her knuckles, she discovers, are stretched tight, her hands clenched. Breathing deeply through her teeth, she slowly, slowly forces herself to unbend them. She is not him. Her parents may be vanished but she is not a murderer, a blood-traitor, a prisoner. She can control her anger and her fear, unlike the man who sits in the cell. Where she has moved from her vast loneliness to friendship, to real bonds, Kylo has only moved in the opposite direction.

 

She does not pity Kylo, but she thinks she understands some part of him.

 

“What’re you like, anyway?”

 

“What?”

 

“Under that bucket of yours. You can’t spend all your time thinking about setting infants on fire, or whatever.”

 

After a while, he says, “I don’t—enjoy others’ fear. I am not a sadist. Fear should be induced for a purpose.”

 

“Intimidation.”

 

“Or something to build yourself upon.”

 

“Not the most stable of foundations. You’ve never looked for happiness? Or is the Order too fragile for that?”

 

“Happiness is a weakness. It can be exploited.”

 

“So can fear,” she counters. “Forget it, Ren. Everything is too complicated with you.”

 

“Then what were you looking for?”

 

“I don’t know. You have _anything_ in you that’s not deep and broody? A favorite color, or something?”

 

“…What is the point of having a favorite color?”

 

She gives up. “No point,” she says. “You’re right. A color can’t be used to scare someone, or torture them or subjugate them. It’s utterly pointless and probably foolish to have one. Mine is purple, by the way. I’m tired of you now. Good night.” If he doesn’t want to face the responsibilities of becoming a person, far be it from her to lead him by the horns. Really, honestly, she could care less.

 

But the next day, he says to no one in particular, “Black.”

 

Rey can’t help but smile. Hardly unexpected. But it’s something.


End file.
